'Murder at the End of the World' Finale Explained: Don't Be Late for Dinner

By Dustin Rowles | TV | December 19, 2023 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | December 19, 2023 |

Spoilers for Hulu’s Murder at the End of the World

I am not overly familiar with the past works of Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij beyond a few episodes of The OA, but I had a hunch early on about who the killer might be. When a colleague here mentioned the recurring themes in the projects of Marling and Batmanglij — ecology, technology, and capitalism — I felt certain after the fourth episode that my hunch was correct: Ray — the AI — would be the culprit. As the final three episodes progressed, the additional clues made that obvious, and once we learned that Bill had highlighted “faulty programming” in Darby’s Silver Doe book, no doubt remained.

If there was any surprise, however, it was the role of Zoomer, although even that was obvious to those willing to put aside how preposterous it was that an AI directed a five-year-old boy to inject enough morphine into the arm of Bill during a game of pretend doctor to kill him. At the direction of Ray (the AI Butler), Zoomer also attached Rohan’s pacemaker to a computer — again, believing he was playing a game of pretend doctor — allowing Ray to hack it and kill him because Rohan had learned the truth about Bill’s death.

The reason why Ray killed Bill was because Ray’s creator, Andy, used Ray as a therapist to process his feelings. Ray knew that Bill was Zoomer’s biological father, something that even Andy’s wife Lee didn’t know (Andy is sterile, so he deduced when Lee became pregnant that the baby had to be Bill’s). When an enraged Andy vented his anger about Bill to Ray because Bill showed up late to dinner, Andy told Ray that he was so mad he wanted Bill to die. Ray took that literally.

Bill and Rohan died because Bill was late to dinner. It’s a shame about Ray.

The death of Sian — the Brazillian doctor whose helmet ran out of oxygen — was an accident. Lu Mei had tried to hack the retreat’s firewall, and Ray shut down the power to prevent it. The helmet Sian was wearing required power to remove it; without it, they had to perform an emergency tracheotomy to save her. Sian died of an infection from the tracheotomy.

Once “Gen Z Sherlock” Darby figured all this out, she and Lee worked together to destroy Ray. With a laptop battery, sanitizer, and a $10 bill, they set the server room on fire while Ray unsuccessfully tried to manipulate them out of doing so by telling Zoomer if they set fire to him, they wouldn’t be able to finish their game. Zoomer is five. He did not give a fuck.

Lee and Zoomer slipped out before the authorities arrived and used a lifeboat to jump on a ship, stay off the grid, and escape the controlling Andy.

It’s a silly ending, but it could have been forgiven had it successfully connected the flashbacks of a younger Bill and Darby to the present. That was the most compelling part of Murder at the End of the World. Alas, the Silver Doe killer the two of them tracked down had no connection whatsoever to the deaths in Iceland.

Andy invited Bill to his retreat but knew that Bill would not come without a bigger reason: That’s why he asked Darby — to lure Bill. Bill came because Darby was there, and besides Bill’s ability to point to the “faulty programming” passage in Darby’s book, there was almost no other reason for the backstory to exist beyond tricking viewers into believing that The Murder at the End of the World might have been more Agatha Christie than Gen Z 2001.

In sum: Don’t show up late to dinner because the AI will lose its shit and kill you.